If there revenue is that great, then they just need to reduce costs to get to profitability. However, those numbers just don't make sense.
Reducing costs isn't always easy and revenues are likely to decline in this economy. They've been reducing workforce but that doesn't show immediate benefits because of severance packages and they didn't cut enough soon enough.
Don't know what doesn't make sense. Unless you're implying that the SEC is allowing them to commit fraud. While the SEC doesn't have a stellar record because of Madoff, I doubt that's the case here.
The inflation adjusted price for a movie ticket during The Great Depression was about $4. Today it's about twice that. Almost every industry inflated prices to get a piece of the free money that was flying around these past few years.
Today people have more options. Cable, DVDs and even illegal downloads.
Sure people will still go. But probably not as much as they used to if prices stay the same. Can't help people being stupid for the short term rather then trying to rebuild the 10's of thousands they lost in their retirement accounts.
You have to understand where many of the cobol programs are running and what their function is. They're not little shell scripts people wrote for fun. They usually power the core of large businesses and depending on the business could be responsible for millions or billions of dollars in trasactions a day.
Screwing with that, when everything is working fine is not a good idea. When Cobol programmers become even more rare it will become a more desirable job for programmers. I think places like ITT tech and Devry teach cobol to youngins. I don't remember the exact place but I remember running across a couple of them.
Think of it this way. If Apple came out with a new iHeart would you have surgery to replace your perfectly functioning heart with an artificial one just so you can play mp3s?
The economy is pretty bad and will take a long time to get fixed. When it is fixed, it's not going to be anything like the free ride a lot of people were used to in the past decade.
Pro gaming isn't going to be the only area. I expect actors and pro athletes to take a hit too.
Does it make sense to pay someone millions of dollars to play a game or pretend to be someone else in front of a camera while millions are losing their homes and jobs?
Take pro sports. Where do they make their money? Well. One way is selling tickets to games. But ticket prices have been soaring. Here's a historical look at Yankee ticket prices. It's really insane to think a box seat goes for $250 after season ticket discounts. That's just not something a lot of people are going to be able to justify. Same goes for merchandise.
Another way that sports franchises make money is through advertising. Both in the venue, on tv and through endorsements. Many people are spending less. They either don't have the income they used to have or they need to save more to cover the losses in their savings and retirement plans. It doesn't matter who endorses that new toy/car/carpet/whatever. People will be buying less. That means less money is going to be spent on advertising and we already started seeing advertising budgets cut.
The economy grew too high, too fast with nothing to support it. The current administration and previous administration kept pumping money into the system to keep it from collapsing. That can't go on forever. We're not going to recover from it. The best we can hope is that all this money that is being printed is being used in a way that will go into new industries that can help fill the void all these scammers created.
They haven't ever been able to make any money off of Java, even though it is widely used
In one of Jonathan Schwartz blog posts he said they make something like $275 million a year just from licensing Java. The way it's phrased doesn't seem to include any of their other Java software such as the Enterprise Server stack.
Sun's revenue is close to $14 Billion a year. To compare, RedHat is only $164 Million, Novel is $214 mil, Oracle is $5.5 billion, IBM is $127 Billion.
They're selling stuff and bringing in a decent chunk of change. The problem they have is in making a profit. There's a huge potential there.
SystemTap or LTTng might very well appear in the Linux mainline this year. And now they also support use of DTrace tracepoints.
Is that supposed to be a joke? I didn't get much sleep last night so maybe I'm missing the sarcasm.
The blog post I linked too told of the transition in 2002. It's now 2009. That's 7 years and the best you can do is say some half-assed knock-offs might be coming to Linux this year?
I hope they do too. I think they need to come up with an extra $500 million by this summer otherwise they might be in some trouble. That's going to be hard to do in this current economic climate.
I wonder if they asked for a bailout. I think even IBM did.
I agree. PostgreSQL is much closer to Oracle than MySQL is. Anyone that thinks MySQL is the best replacement for Oracle likely doesn't know much about Oracle.
It seems that sun has done a bit with PostgreSQL as well. Too bad they bought MySQL. They should have instead invested in making PostgreSQL better, at least developing better replication and clustering. That way, PostgreSQL would have been an even stronger alternative to Oracle.
Oracle used to have Solaris/SPARC as their main development platform, then they switched to Linux. That seems to have been a big blow to Sun. While Oracle still releases Oracle for Solaris/Sparc along with Linux, but the Solaris/x86 versions are always slow. I don't 11g has been released for Solaris/x86 yet.
If I was Jonathan Schwartz, I would have rather put the $1bln they spent on MySQL on PostgreSQL. I don't think it would have even really taken that much either. I'm still just baffled over spending $1bln on a company that I think made $50mln in it's best year!?!?!
Anyway... Oracle developers might not have been too happy about moving away from Solaris because they'd lose DTrace.
I thought I heard something about there being some bad blood between Ellison and Sun but I don't know what that was about.
Do people still use JDBC directly for webapps? I thought most people were using either JDO/JPA. Most of the JDBC stuff is boilerplate and takes a long time if you have a large database.
I have used this DAO Generator a few times and it really cut down development time when using postgresql databases.
Only free one I found that seems to follow the DAO pattern closely. It's a little rough but it works.
Using Google App Engine I guess is a little more like Hibernate, where it's and object relational store, except without the relational part. You need to handle the relations in your code.
I just took a quick look. It's not really a RDBMS but it's more just a persistent object store. It's schemaless and uses JDO to access objects.
This seems to be the type of databases that cloud application service providers are going to. Likely because it's easier to scale these than to scale a real RDBMS.
(Link to openBVE website omitted due to already unreliable servers)
Uhmm... you do realize the slashdot effect is only for the main story. Most links in comments don't get the same amount of traffic.
In addition to the RTFA phrase, there is a RTFC (read the fine comments) that is similar. You probably never heard of it because the people that use it, don't leave or read comments.
It's not the same. The only thing you can download from Red Hat is a 30 day trial subscription.
After the 30 days are up, if you don't purchase a subscription, you can't get updates. You could download and compile the updates yourself, but that's a pain.
With Solaris, if you don't buy a subscription, you still get security updates and bug fixes.
isnt it sort of in the FBI's realm to investigate large-scale fraud?
Even if it's their job to investigate fraud, what they did in both these cases seems unreasonable.
It would be like the FBI shutting down a shopping mall and confiscating all the inventory because one store was selling stolen goods.
One of the reasons small sites colocate or go with dedicated servers is so the stupid actions of others on a shared hosting account won't bring their site down.
If only Sun's marketing was as good as IBM's to get you to believe that paying 10x the price for the same performance was a good deal, this thread wouldn't exist.
Do you have specific benchmarks that back that up?
The link I posted had jappserver2004 results.
SPECjAppServer2004 IBM Power 570 (4 cores, 2 chips, 2 cores/chip) result of 1,197.51 JOPS@Standard vs. Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 (16 cores, 2 chip, 8 cores/chip) result of 3,331 JOPS@Standard. Source: www.spec.org; Results as of 4/10/08.
Well yes, ever since IBM first introduced a multi-core chip everyone is pretty much going down the same path.
You make it sound like IBM was the first multicore cpu manufacturer. They weren't. The power4 came out in 2001. In the 90's there were multicore processors, even Sun had a multicore processor in the 90s. It was aimed as a java processor but was only used as a graphics processor, as most of the multi core chips were at that time. It never went anywhere but it seems that parts of it moved on to the Niagara chips, or at least influenced them.
Ghz isn't the same across the board. For example, Clock for Clock, AMD tends to deliver more performance. SPARC processors also run at a lower clock speed than Intel and Power CPUs. In 2004, Sun released the UltraSPARC IV which ran from 1.05-1.35GHZ. The T1 that came out in 2005 ran at 1-1.4Ghz. That's not a lower clock speed. In 2005, Sun also came out with the US IV+ which was faster. 1.5-2.1Ghz. So at worst, they were one year behind in clockspeed with the Niagara chips which isn't a big deal considering the benefits.
The USIV was a single core dual thread chip. The T1 was 4 cores, 8 threads. You could consolidate 4 USIV servers into one T1 server and still have 4x as many threads per instance.
Yes it's a niche. But it's a HUGE niche. Enterprise server consolidation, webserving, java application servers, pretty much any multiuser application.
According to this IBM blog post, a Power6 core offers only 43% more performance than a UltraSparc T2 core.
That's not a big difference when you consider the T2 server is cheaper and has 4 times as many cores. Overall the system performs better than the IBM server by almost 3x.
Multithreaded applications aren't new, and today a lot of workloads benefit from them. Since linux and commodity servers became popular, applications began to parallelize work loads to take advantage of that. So sun put all those servers back in one box to reduce latency and save a lot of power.
In the case of a web application, being able to serve a page 300ms faster isn't that big a win, but being able to dramatically increase the number of simultaneous connections is huge.
IBM recently announced their Nehelem xeon processor which seems similar to the T2 chips. In a video they said it performs 1.7x better at 1/2 the cost of sparc, which I assume they meant the T2. (By the way, the power proc was even slower and 5x more expensive).
The UltraSPARC T1 has been selling in servers since 2005. T2 based servers have been selling since 2007. People that adopted that technology didn't have to wait till now for Intel to come up with something comparable.
I've only run across dual socket configurations of the Xeon 5500 motherboards, while sun is selling servers with up to 8 T2 chips.
Slashdot Mirror
If there revenue is that great, then they just need to reduce costs to get to profitability. However, those numbers just don't make sense.
Reducing costs isn't always easy and revenues are likely to decline in this economy. They've been reducing workforce but that doesn't show immediate benefits because of severance packages and they didn't cut enough soon enough.
Don't know what doesn't make sense. Unless you're implying that the SEC is allowing them to commit fraud. While the SEC doesn't have a stellar record because of Madoff, I doubt that's the case here.
Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Go onto the Colbert Report to name something for the show that comes before him? Sorry, Try Again.
Good point. They'll probably name it the USS Manilow.
you think that the internet is unlimited
Seriously. We all know the internet is limited. Fits in a shipping container.
The inflation adjusted price for a movie ticket during The Great Depression was about $4. Today it's about twice that. Almost every industry inflated prices to get a piece of the free money that was flying around these past few years.
Today people have more options. Cable, DVDs and even illegal downloads.
Sure people will still go. But probably not as much as they used to if prices stay the same. Can't help people being stupid for the short term rather then trying to rebuild the 10's of thousands they lost in their retirement accounts.
You have to understand where many of the cobol programs are running and what their function is. They're not little shell scripts people wrote for fun. They usually power the core of large businesses and depending on the business could be responsible for millions or billions of dollars in trasactions a day.
Screwing with that, when everything is working fine is not a good idea. When Cobol programmers become even more rare it will become a more desirable job for programmers. I think places like ITT tech and Devry teach cobol to youngins. I don't remember the exact place but I remember running across a couple of them.
Think of it this way. If Apple came out with a new iHeart would you have surgery to replace your perfectly functioning heart with an artificial one just so you can play mp3s?
The economy is pretty bad and will take a long time to get fixed. When it is fixed, it's not going to be anything like the free ride a lot of people were used to in the past decade.
Pro gaming isn't going to be the only area. I expect actors and pro athletes to take a hit too.
Does it make sense to pay someone millions of dollars to play a game or pretend to be someone else in front of a camera while millions are losing their homes and jobs?
Take pro sports. Where do they make their money? Well. One way is selling tickets to games. But ticket prices have been soaring. Here's a historical look at Yankee ticket prices. It's really insane to think a box seat goes for $250 after season ticket discounts. That's just not something a lot of people are going to be able to justify. Same goes for merchandise.
Another way that sports franchises make money is through advertising. Both in the venue, on tv and through endorsements. Many people are spending less. They either don't have the income they used to have or they need to save more to cover the losses in their savings and retirement plans. It doesn't matter who endorses that new toy/car/carpet/whatever. People will be buying less. That means less money is going to be spent on advertising and we already started seeing advertising budgets cut.
The economy grew too high, too fast with nothing to support it. The current administration and previous administration kept pumping money into the system to keep it from collapsing. That can't go on forever. We're not going to recover from it. The best we can hope is that all this money that is being printed is being used in a way that will go into new industries that can help fill the void all these scammers created.
The question is: Did you use soap?
Ah.... and olde tyme geek.
Times have changed. You don't need a long beard, poor hygiene and smelly clothes to be take seriously these days :)
They haven't ever been able to make any money off of Java, even though it is widely used
In one of Jonathan Schwartz blog posts he said they make something like $275 million a year just from licensing Java. The way it's phrased doesn't seem to include any of their other Java software such as the Enterprise Server stack.
Sun's revenue is close to $14 Billion a year. To compare, RedHat is only $164 Million, Novel is $214 mil, Oracle is $5.5 billion, IBM is $127 Billion.
They're selling stuff and bringing in a decent chunk of change. The problem they have is in making a profit. There's a huge potential there.
SystemTap or LTTng might very well appear in the Linux mainline this year. And now they also support use of DTrace tracepoints.
Is that supposed to be a joke? I didn't get much sleep last night so maybe I'm missing the sarcasm.
The blog post I linked too told of the transition in 2002. It's now 2009. That's 7 years and the best you can do is say some half-assed knock-offs might be coming to Linux this year?
I hope they do too. I think they need to come up with an extra $500 million by this summer otherwise they might be in some trouble. That's going to be hard to do in this current economic climate.
I wonder if they asked for a bailout. I think even IBM did.
I agree. PostgreSQL is much closer to Oracle than MySQL is. Anyone that thinks MySQL is the best replacement for Oracle likely doesn't know much about Oracle.
It seems that sun has done a bit with PostgreSQL as well. Too bad they bought MySQL. They should have instead invested in making PostgreSQL better, at least developing better replication and clustering. That way, PostgreSQL would have been an even stronger alternative to Oracle.
Oracle used to have Solaris/SPARC as their main development platform, then they switched to Linux. That seems to have been a big blow to Sun. While Oracle still releases Oracle for Solaris/Sparc along with Linux, but the Solaris/x86 versions are always slow. I don't 11g has been released for Solaris/x86 yet.
If I was Jonathan Schwartz, I would have rather put the $1bln they spent on MySQL on PostgreSQL. I don't think it would have even really taken that much either. I'm still just baffled over spending $1bln on a company that I think made $50mln in it's best year!?!?!
Anyway... Oracle developers might not have been too happy about moving away from Solaris because they'd lose DTrace.
I thought I heard something about there being some bad blood between Ellison and Sun but I don't know what that was about.
I still think Cisco should be more interested.
We're not stealing the sun's energy.
They sun spots have realized we were watching them and it turns out they are shy. They are just on the other side of the sun now.
Do people still use JDBC directly for webapps? I thought most people were using either JDO/JPA. Most of the JDBC stuff is boilerplate and takes a long time if you have a large database.
I have used this DAO Generator a few times and it really cut down development time when using postgresql databases.
Only free one I found that seems to follow the DAO pattern closely. It's a little rough but it works.
Using Google App Engine I guess is a little more like Hibernate, where it's and object relational store, except without the relational part. You need to handle the relations in your code.
Looks like it also supports JPA.
Oh. So Java makes them want to be a better programmer :)
I just took a quick look. It's not really a RDBMS but it's more just a persistent object store. It's schemaless and uses JDO to access objects.
This seems to be the type of databases that cloud application service providers are going to. Likely because it's easier to scale these than to scale a real RDBMS.
So what you are basically saying is that Java isn't better than PHP, instead, Java developers are better than PHP developers on the whole.
(Link to openBVE website omitted due to already unreliable servers)
Uhmm... you do realize the slashdot effect is only for the main story. Most links in comments don't get the same amount of traffic.
In addition to the RTFA phrase, there is a RTFC (read the fine comments) that is similar. You probably never heard of it because the people that use it, don't leave or read comments.
Psssssttttt! Wanna guess what I'm typing this post with?
Your fingers.
IBM releases the bulk of Sun offerings back to the FOSS community.
Uhm... Sun already did that. FOSS > GPL
It's not the same. The only thing you can download from Red Hat is a 30 day trial subscription.
After the 30 days are up, if you don't purchase a subscription, you can't get updates. You could download and compile the updates yourself, but that's a pain.
With Solaris, if you don't buy a subscription, you still get security updates and bug fixes.
isnt it sort of in the FBI's realm to investigate large-scale fraud?
Even if it's their job to investigate fraud, what they did in both these cases seems unreasonable.
It would be like the FBI shutting down a shopping mall and confiscating all the inventory because one store was selling stolen goods.
One of the reasons small sites colocate or go with dedicated servers is so the stupid actions of others on a shared hosting account won't bring their site down.
I was specifically talking about your claim that 1 Power6 core was only 43% faster than 1 T2 core
That wasn't my claim. I pulled that directly from the IBM blog.
IBM Power 570 4 cores, 2 chips 1,197.51 JOPS = 299.3775 JOPS/core
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 16 cores, 2 chips 3,331 JOPS = 208.1875 JOPS/core
(299.3775/208.1875) - 1 = 43.8%
The T5440 is also cheaper than an IBM p570.
What Pat Gelsinger recently said comparing the new Xeon 5500 processors with Sparc and Power cpus.
The 5500 was 1.7x the performance and 1/2 the cost.
Comparing to IBM power was "almost humorous" at 2.5x the performance at 1/10th the cost.
Here's some more information comparing the two running Siebel. The UltraSPARC T2 servers perform better and are much cheaper than IBM's
If only Sun's marketing was as good as IBM's to get you to believe that paying 10x the price for the same performance was a good deal, this thread wouldn't exist.
It was designed for web serving type workloads
Yeah... Too bad the interweb never caught on.
Do you have specific benchmarks that back that up?
The link I posted had jappserver2004 results.
SPECjAppServer2004 IBM Power 570 (4 cores, 2 chips, 2 cores/chip) result of 1,197.51 JOPS@Standard vs. Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 (16 cores, 2 chip, 8 cores/chip) result of 3,331 JOPS@Standard. Source: www.spec.org; Results as of 4/10/08.
Sun also has some results of spec benchmarks on T2 servers
You mean Intel's Nehalem
Yes, thinking faster than I was typing.
Well yes, ever since IBM first introduced a multi-core chip everyone is pretty much going down the same path.
You make it sound like IBM was the first multicore cpu manufacturer. They weren't. The power4 came out in 2001. In the 90's there were multicore processors, even Sun had a multicore processor in the 90s. It was aimed as a java processor but was only used as a graphics processor, as most of the multi core chips were at that time. It never went anywhere but it seems that parts of it moved on to the Niagara chips, or at least influenced them.
Ghz isn't the same across the board. For example, Clock for Clock, AMD tends to deliver more performance. SPARC processors also run at a lower clock speed than Intel and Power CPUs. In 2004, Sun released the UltraSPARC IV which ran from 1.05-1.35GHZ. The T1 that came out in 2005 ran at 1-1.4Ghz. That's not a lower clock speed. In 2005, Sun also came out with the US IV+ which was faster. 1.5-2.1Ghz. So at worst, they were one year behind in clockspeed with the Niagara chips which isn't a big deal considering the benefits.
The USIV was a single core dual thread chip. The T1 was 4 cores, 8 threads. You could consolidate 4 USIV servers into one T1 server and still have 4x as many threads per instance.
I don't think you know what you're talking about.
Yes it's a niche. But it's a HUGE niche. Enterprise server consolidation, webserving, java application servers, pretty much any multiuser application.
According to this IBM blog post, a Power6 core offers only 43% more performance than a UltraSparc T2 core.
That's not a big difference when you consider the T2 server is cheaper and has 4 times as many cores. Overall the system performs better than the IBM server by almost 3x.
Multithreaded applications aren't new, and today a lot of workloads benefit from them. Since linux and commodity servers became popular, applications began to parallelize work loads to take advantage of that. So sun put all those servers back in one box to reduce latency and save a lot of power.
In the case of a web application, being able to serve a page 300ms faster isn't that big a win, but being able to dramatically increase the number of simultaneous connections is huge.
IBM recently announced their Nehelem xeon processor which seems similar to the T2 chips. In a video they said it performs 1.7x better at 1/2 the cost of sparc, which I assume they meant the T2. (By the way, the power proc was even slower and 5x more expensive).
The UltraSPARC T1 has been selling in servers since 2005. T2 based servers have been selling since 2007. People that adopted that technology didn't have to wait till now for Intel to come up with something comparable.
I've only run across dual socket configurations of the Xeon 5500 motherboards, while sun is selling servers with up to 8 T2 chips.
Every public company is for sale.